John,
Thats kind of what I thought. I wasn't even sure if my question was even
intelligent in Linux. I know that in the old school days of OS/2 and even
Windows 95 it was a good idea to hack away at a config file or two to control
how much physical RAM was being used as a disk cache. Perhaps this ideology
was intended more for RAM-contrained systems rather than maintaining optimum
system performance.
Thanks for the reply.
-Chris
On Mon, 24 Apr 2000, you wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Apr 2000, you wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > In Mandrake, is there a way where I can control the amount of memory being
> > used as a disk cache? I've noticed that sometimes Mandrake is using almost
> > 100MB of physcial RAM as a disk cache, especially after doing something
> > intensive such as compiling an application. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to
> > shrink
> >
> > I have 256MB of physcial RAM in my box. I would *think* that having a maximum
> > of a 64MB disk cache would suffice. Any thoughts? Thanks...
> >
> I think it's part of the O/S that Linux uses "available"
> memory to cache the disks. AFAIK, that can't be changed w/o
> rewriting the kernel.
> This came up awhile back and it was pointed out at that
> time that linux DOES release memory as needed by the
> various applications, but that it continues to buffer the
> disks up to available RAM.
> John
